Well, seven start-up screens later and the BF2 demo is here... I've had a lot of fun playing around with it so
far. The models and animations are outstanding, though I am experiencing
occasional texture corruptions that seem to be related to smoke and explosion
effects (on an NVIDIA card, rather than ATI, where there was a warning this
could happen, in spite of upgrading to the mystery ForceWare upgrade included
with the demo). It took a while to get a feel for the game's scale, but it
definitely works. I'm a bit mystified at having to create a GameSpy login to
play a demo that was not hosted on GameSpy's network, but the game industry has
become all about strange bedfellows, so there that is. I asked EA if the full
game would likewise require signing on with GameSpy/IGN, but received no reply.

The most frustrating aspect of the demo for me is the preposterous key
configuration screen. I thought BF1942 and BF:V had it bad with mysterious hunts
for key conflicts, but BF2 takes this to a whole new level, with an arbitrary
default setup that uses about every key on the keyboard, requiring the user to
find all the conflicts before assigning keys. The least they could do is provide
a 'clear all' function to start fresh here, but the way this config screen
operates gives the impression that it was coded and released without anyone
trying it. I have never had a more frustrating setup experience prior to
playing a game. And that's not to mention the keys you can't assign at all...
Alt, Left Shift, the mousewheel (there was this brief moment when mousewheel
reconfiguration worked in BF1942, but that got broken again in a subsequent
patch)... apparently those of us used to assigning these keys to our own needs
are just SOL. I've seen reports that the numeric keypad cannot be reconfigured
either (there's
a post to our forums outlining a way to configure hidden keys that I haven't
looked into yet, but am hopeful will provide some help with this). After
struggling through the process of configuring keys for the solo version, I
decided that was something I never wanted to do again, which, of course, is
exactly what I had to do right away after creating a multiplayer account. Argh!
I'd express hopes that these issues won't be present in the full game, but since
it went gold over a week ago, that doesn't seem very realistic.

The key mapping does suck. The server browser, just like BF42's, is worthless. The weapons select with the wheel scroll again skips exactly that weapon you're frantically trying to access. I can live with it because the game is stunning and a hell of a lot of fun. Re the bots, I got into a close quarter battle with 3 bots who all pulled their knives, lol! I killed two but the other just came at me like he was Jason from Friday 13th, just couldn't shake him and he got me.